Representing America - American Literature AP - Blog

The Vision of a Real "Black Swan"

Side Note: There are a lot of spoilers in this critique of Black Swan. Sorry for those who haven't seen this awesome film yet.

In the "Black Swan", Natalie Portman (the main actress) plays Nina who's a ballerina at a very well-known Balle Company. Thomas (the company's artistic director) gives Nina a very important role by casting her as the black and white swan in "Swan Lake", but he gives her the role after he sexually assaults her. In the film, the relationship between the male ballet leaders and their female dancers is pretty strange (seriously, It's strange!) For example, Thomas always have a creepy look when he's challenging Nina, including when he attempts to give up Nina's pursuit to happiness and perfection. Thomas (I forgot to mention, his name is pronounced "Tomah") that uses his own body against Nina's to force her to find her strength is part of what Aronofsky’s film wants to critique, but also partly what makes watching it uncomfortable and kind of explicit. The fact that Nina wants this role so badly, Thomas would do anything to have it his way, which sexually assaulting her over and over. As her relationship with Thomas gets more strange, she begins to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

Beth (another main character) is known to be one of the best dancers in the company and she is also a fan favorite. However, she is forced to retire so that Nina can take over her spot. Due to Beth's success with the company, I would assume that Nina was really jealous. As a result, she steals Beth’s lipstick, a pack of cigarettes, and a letter opener, totemic objects that Nina carries as talismans for her own benefits (Jealousy a huge factor in this situation.) Beth doesn't want to retire, but her fame and fortune went completely down hill from there on. Due to her large slump, Beth decided to cause a scene at a benefit party and then throw herself into New York City traffic, landing in a hospital where she is left with scars. She remains in the hospital, in a wheel chair, with her head down as it shows how her career also decided her fate. Nina visits Beth from time to time, but relaizes that the frequent trips to the hospital are completely and she begins to break down.

Darren Aronofsky(The author of Black Swan) signals his vision of his own leading lady with heavy-handed shots of Portman(main actress) fragmented and multiplied by the various mirrors in which her life is continually reflected.In the claustrophobic apartment she shares with her equally insane mother, Erica, a mirror by the front door is cut into pie-shaped wedges that breaks Nina’s image into pieces, and the three-sided mirror in which she practices and obsessively laces and re-laces her toe shoes ensures that even at home, she’s always onstage.

Erica was a corps member herself before she stopped dancing to raise Nina. There is no father (This is where things got awkward to me)  just the two women who represent different generations of the same dream. Erica both wants Nina to succeed and desperately needs her to fail, so that her daughter will cling to her, imprisoned in the child-like state Erica insists on preserving. Nina’s bedroom is lined with rows of white and pink stuffed animals that stare down at her bed, and every night, she goes to sleep with the tinny music box sounds of “Swan Lake” that her mother sets in motion to soothe her. Erica intrudes on Nina’s privacy, checking the rash that appears across her daughter’s back, stopping her for mutilating herself and at the same time, helping Nina hide her wounds. When Nina is cast in the lead role in Swan Lake, Erica doesn’t set out to sabotage her success, but willingly abets Nina’s fast downward spiral when it begins.

The real agent of Nina’s downfall is the woman who might otherwise be her savior. Lily (played by the lovely Mila Kunis) arrives in the company from LA full of self-confident sexuality.  Nina catches a glimpse of her first on a subway, distracted from her own image in its Plexiglas windows by Lily’s hair and the headphones she wears. Lily makes her first appearance at the studio by banging open and closed the door while Nina is dancing, causing her to stumble in her audition for Swan Lake. But Lily’s dtermination proves a refreshing counter-balance to a ballet world in which young women are wound tight, can’t eat, throw up what they do get down, and like Nina, are so disciplined to be perfect that they have no lives outside their dancing.

(I've decided to fast forward a little in order to get to the important parts of the film.)

Ever since the beginning of Black Swan, moments that seem true are suddenly proven false. In the bathroom of the ballet benefit party, Nina’s ragged cuticles begin to bleed and she can’t get them to stop, eventually peeling a three-inch strip of flesh from her finger. But when she’s interrupted by, as it happens, Lily knocking on the door, Nina looks down to see her finger suddenly healed. This girl bleeds terribly and her toenails break from dancing on them, her back bleeds from scratching, and blood continually reddens the water in which she bathes and washes. But we’re never sure if her wounds are real, and neither does Nina seems to be healed either.

 In the climax of the film, Nina allf of sudden kills Lily due to serious anger. She also smashes everything in the room (including the mirror) and hides Lily body. She then goes on to finish the Second Act to Black Swan where her performance as the Black Swan including both rage and anger. (How Ironic!)

 

What can we make out of the Black Swan is that Nina is slowly becoming a monster, unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. Her anxiety drives her to scratch herself until she bleeds, and from her wounds, feathers emerge.  As she dances, she spreads her wings, but the wings are black.  She is a good girl gone bad.

 Her flirtation with darkness is accompanied by crippling paranoia.  Nina witnesses self-mutilation, passionate sex, and even murder-- but her eyes cannot be trusted.  From a first-person perspective, the audience is left to feel as helpless and confused as their hero.

Initially, the producer calls her frigid.  But he is magnetically drawn to her after witnessing her transformation.  Unfortunately, this triumph is short-lived.  Nina experiences the duality she always yearned for in her final moments, but it's too late. To end this analysis, all I can say is that Darren did create a film that mostly focused on excessive violence and artistic cruelty. Even as Aronofsky dismantles the foundation of Nina's world and her sanity/insanity, it keeps the viewer equally unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. To conclude this, Portman (Main actress) holds the audience in such a way to remain on Nina’s side, hoping that she’ll be victorious against all the forces that lined up against her.

Stereotyping of the Teenage Dream

During the first few days of class we talked a little about the stereotyping of teenage girls. its a subject i feel very strongly about. these days its hard to walk around and not see hear or touch reminders that you may not be the perfect teenage girl. pop culture has bombarded us with the image of the teenage dream, according to katy perry the dream is to spend time with the perfect boy, to others its having all the boys like you. the interest that artists like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift have on the aspect of male admirers in a girls life, confuses me. because as a teenage girl, and being around so many others all the time, i find that their focus is not always on boys but instead on school or sport or their families. I find in my experience that girls can be fiercely dedicated to their competitive sport or to a part in a show, and not on the attention a boy puts on them.

so much pressure is put on teenagers both boys and girls to do well in school, and to be involved with activities, that when we do have free time its not used to be with boys but to rest or study or be with friends.

i think that  girls especially get distracted and then dissatisfied with their own lives because it doesn't live up to the standards that have been set by music and other pop culture. they may think that because they are not "driving to cali and getting drunk on the beach" that they are not living a truly full live. when in reality the stereotypes and images of "girl life" in movies and music depicts a completely inaccurate picture of a rich developing and  maturing teenage girl, we should be surrounded by friends, sport, and culture. weather or not we have the perfect jeans or boy or social life isn't truly important. and the images we look at all day rarely show a girl that side of life.

Image over Substance, Materialism at It's Best

Many American women and men suffer to escape the walls of what the material world traps us in. While taking the bus to school, while ordering food at a resturant, or even just leaving a coffee shop, advertisments of ads from all different points of the material spectrum are posted. Having so much of modern day America be so consumed in what designers the celebrities are wearing or who did their make up for the red carpet event takes away the minds of dozens of Americans to assume what they see in the magazines to be what they expect to look, talk, or feel like in real life. While eating dinner one night, I came across an add for Dolce & Gabbana which completely exploits women, making them look like a sex object for the eyes of all men. This made me question; Why would anyone advertise clothing by publishing a women being dominated by a man? And even so, the clothing that they are trying to sell in the ad is almost totally absent. This attept for creating an eye drawing scene, well, unfortunatly, did it's job. But, this ad is nothing more than a moment of pleasure because of the lack of advertising clothing (the actual object set to be sold!) This simple picture, which is only one of the many ad campaigns that diminish self esteem of women or just advertise the product through sex appeal or solely the appearance of a model gives the impression to America that image is the most important thing they must care about. Image over clothing, over character, over substance, over slef worth... These ads are giving American's the wrong idea about what is important and provides them with flase ideals on the real world. 

 

Breathe In, Dead Soldier. Breathe Out.

First off, I really really like this book. My favorite book of the year hands down.

I mean, yes, my squeamishness comes out in full force during many stories in this book (Ted Lavender, anyone? Curt Lemon? BABY BUFFALO?) but still. I can feel this book.

And I don't mean "feel it" like "Hey man, I totally feel you", but more as if there is a tangible presence to this book, and it's taken up residence in my lungs.

Breathe in, Vietnam. Sunshine demise and baby buffalo and blood in my mouth.

Breathe out, Tim O'Brian. 43 years old, a writer who still breathes in as a soldier and out as a father who tells his nine-year-old daughter that of course he didn't kill anyone.

Breathe out breath out breathe out.

And alright, yes, I admit I might have read ahead. A little. Or a lot, maybe: I finished the book.

And I can only think "Well damn."

Because what about all the soldiers we're still sending out?

Are they pulling their brothers out of trees, peeling them off the dusty, explosion-riddled road, digging them out of a sloppy, mushy shitfield in the pouring rain?

Probably.

Are there men out there like Tim O'Brian, who don't really want to fight but they do it anyway, because they'd feel like they were betraying everyone they know but themselves if they didn't?

Absolutely. 

I've been reading a lot of war stories lately, and I gotta tell you, I cry. At all of them. Sob my eyes out like there is no longer any rainbows or unicorns or happiness in the world. None.

I cry like a five year old who has just been informed that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny have all been heartlessly massacred.

And I wonder what would happen if the head honchos, the men and women who start the war but send others to end it, would they feel like a different decision is in order if they read one of these books?

Do you think maybe, that if people who felt like war was necessary to solve whatever problem they have, do you think if someone made them read these war novels, this book, The Things They Carried, would we maybe get somewhere towards convincing the world just what a stupid idea it is to go out and shoot at people, and get shot at, and die, and watch your friends die, ( "Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.")...

Will anyone care at all? Will anyone try their damndest to make a dead soldier breathe again?

 

Will anyone listen to the breathing of a dead soldier?